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Inspirational Quotations by D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)

D. H. Lawrence (1885–30) was an English author of provocative novels that attracted controversy for their sexual content. He was also a successful poet, playwright, and short-story writer.

Lawrence is best known for inciting strong reactions in his readers for his radical narrative of familial and marital lives and for his brazen celebration of sexual relations. For these reasons, he waged an incessant battle with the censors.

Lawrence’s most famous novels are Sons and Lovers (1913,) The Rainbow (1915,) Women in Love (1920,) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928.) The latter is the most influential and notorious of Lawrence’s novels. It features a young aristocrat whose husband is paralyzed from the waist down and impotent. He encourages her to find a lover but disapproves her choice of his gamekeeper.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned from publication for more than 30 years because of its obscene themes and language. In 1960, a famous court case cleared the book of obscenity after 35 prominent writers and literary critics testified in its favor. When Penguin Books published 200,000 copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the book sold out within a day and most bookstores that carried the book ran out of copies within 15 minutes.

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Tomorrow, The Future

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Thinking

Design in art is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Design

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Intelligence

You’ll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you’ve got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Work, Hard Work

Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Friendship

We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Existence

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Ethics

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Art, Critics, Criticism

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great—quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Love

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Intuition

Tragedy is like strong acid—it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Tragedy

The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.—D. H. LawrenceTopics: Courage